FIVE YEARS ON FACEBOOK: Gently Pushing the World

Facebook is a social networking website that was launched in February 2004. It is operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc and has more than 500 million active users as I write this prose-poem in August 2010. The founders are now billionaires and the advertising generated is in many billions of dollars. Several recent studies have ranked Facebook as the most frequented worldwide social network.

Users can add people as friends and send them messages. This is something I have not done in the five years I have been on Facebook, although I always respond positively to requests for friendship. I do update my personal profile with basic bio-data and information about my education and work experience. I do this occasionally to provide a base of information about myself for those who want to read my writing. Showcasing my writing has become, for me, the main purpose of Facebook.

I have always agreed with George Orwell, author of the famous novel 1984, at least insofar as some writers are concerned, that "at the very bottom of a writer's motives there lies a mystery." Orwell used the word political in the widest possible sense. By political purpose in writing Orwell meant “the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” “Once again,” Orwell went on, “no book is genuinely free from political bias.” Even the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

I am a member of dozens of other cyberspace networks and sites at locations on the net where my writing is found in various quantities, sometimes prose and sometimes poetry and sometimes prose-poetry. I link many of these other cyberspace networks to Facebook. And so it is that the friends which I have acquired at Facebook have come from all over the world. People whom I do not know and will never know seek me out. I do not seek out friends at Facebook, although I did in my first years at Facebook. There is a core, though, of Facebook friends whom I have come to know over the years in my places of work, schools and colleges where I have taught, and groups I have been a member of like: family, religion and formal and informal associations some on the internet and some in real time and space.

I have been a member of Facebook, as I say, for five years. My main activity on Facebook is to showcase my writing in the Links section found on the left-hand side of Facebook’s access page below the Friends section--as well as in the centre of my profile section. I rarely comment on the wall, the photos, the status or the likes sections which are the favourite places at Facebook for millions of participants usually in sentences resembling the short sound-bites of the electronic media.

Initially, in the first two or three years I was a registered member, I interacted in the friends section to a limited extent usually in a reactive and not a proactive mode. I always respond to incoming messages, occasionally have a chat in the chat section, and have posted my share of photos to embellish my literary base for those who want to follow-up on my writing. -Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 6 August 2010.

As a writer & poet, editor & publisher,
as well as a journalist with efforts in the
direction of independent scholarship…..
this internet site, Facebook, provides 500
million people, a strong base for an active
dissemination of my literary wares across
cyberspace in 1000s of message boards &
blogs in the world-wide-web--who would
ever have imagined when I retired from a
world of FT, PT & casual-volunteer work
just a decade ago that literally 1000s, no…
millions would access my writing without
me ever having to deal with those publishers,
as I gently push the world in a certain direction
and engage in this mysterious writing process?

Ron Price
6 August 2010

Thanks for those succinct replies

Thanks for those succinct replies, folks. I don't get to this CHUD Forum as often as I'd like. Life is busy, even in retirement, in these middle years--65 to 75--of late adulthood, a period of time some human development psychologists call the years from 60 to 80 in the lifespan. If I last to old age, the period over 80, I should be around for many more years. I wish you all well here in your CHUDDING about.-Ron in Tasmania

To The Clever Chudders-Gang

I like your vision: "puttering around an old Victorian mansion library with lots of wall-paneling, leatherbound books, a big old 19th-century standing globe, and wearing leather patches on his jacket elbows!" Sadly, or perhaps not-so-sadly, my domain is not a mansion, Victorian or otherwise. I have no wall-paneling, leatherbound books or leather patches on my jacket-elbows. I will add the following description of my place of writing, though, since you chaps seem concerned for the location and setting of this particular fellow old chap at this your and mine--CHUD site.-Ron
------------------------------------
THIS HUMBLE HABITATION

When a person plies their trade, their profession or some personal activity in one place for any length of time they tend to keep certain items of equipment, gadgets, tools and resources on their work table or bench, in their study or shed. Were some observer with literary skills to comprehensively describe the work area of a writer and poet like myself such an observer might include in his description the following:

the writer’s desk--its size, quality and orderliness--his files, notebooks, stationary, pens and other aids, his computer, printer, sources of illumination(lamps, lights, access to daylight), photographs, paintings, pictures, objets d’art, a brief outline of his library, the writer’s attitudes to and treatment of his books, the frequency of their use; other items of furniture, technology and resources; the time spent in the study, in this micro-milieux, on a daily basis; the view out of the window and at the doorway, the sounds of the street and of nature; the cleanliness, the frequency the study is dusted and vacuumed.

There is much to describe and depending on the level of detail in the description a writer could go on for pages, but the above provides a general overview.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 20 February 2007.

I’ve had a variety of workplaces
over the years: bedroom, lounge,
dining-room, study and now, in
these early years of late adulthood,
I have the kind of order suited to
my needs: an 18 ft. sq. desk space
with its lamp, trays and dictionary,
printer, computer, keyboard, jug
and glass of water, pens, mouse
and that lemon tree outside the
window in my wife’s lovely garden.

This place of creative tranquillity,
this humble habitation, this place
that is my study where I repose
in peace in this my retirement
far, far from the tumult of society
and its madding crowd in these
darkest hours before the dawn
where my soul can enjoy the
rendezvous with its Source and
the ventilation of a quickening,
renewing, clarifying, amplifying
wind and its rigorous effects,
effects that harrow-up the souls
of billions of humanity's people.

Ron Price
20 February 2007
Updated for: CHUD Forum
On: 8/8/'10

Thanks Teitr Styrr

Thanks Teitr Styrr....I'll say a little more about my internet posting as it has developed since google and microsoft really got going in the 1990s. The post below will help set a context for much of my internet writing and scholarship, publishing and poetizing, editing and journalistic work.-Ron
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GOOGLE-MICROSOFT

In the first year after I retired from FT work, July 1999 to July 2000, Google officially became the world's largest search engine. With its introduction of a billion-page index by June 2000 much of the internet's content became available in a searchable format at one search engine. That billion pages in 2000 is now 60 billion pages.

In the next several years, 2000-2005, as I was retiring from PT work as well as most of the casual and volunteer activity that had occupied me for decades, Google entered into a series of partnerships and made a series of innovations that brought their vast internet enterprize billions of users in the international marketplace. Not only did Google have billions of users, but internet users like myself throughout the world gained access to billions of web documents in Google’s growing index/library. It was a finer and more useful library than any of those in the small towns where I would spend my retirement in the years ahead at the end of the Earth in Tasmania, the last stop on the way to Antarctica if one took the western Pacific-rim route.

This international indeed in some ways, or so it felt, interstellar, cyberspace library also offered a print base with a myriad locations in which I could interact with others and engage in teaching and consolidation activities, social and economic projects, literary and academic endeavours, in ways I had never dreamt of in the first four decades I had been a professional teacher and lecturer, as well as tutor and adult educator. I had also been a member of the Bahá'í Faith from 1959 to 1999, a new religious movement that had become the second most widespread religion on the planet by the turn of the third millennium. This most recent of the Abrahamic religions had pretensions to being the new world Faith for the global civilization emerging as fast as the speed of light in recent decades and as far back, arguably, as 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

In 1994, at the age of fifty, and as I was beginning to eye my retirement from FT work as a teacher and lecturer in Western Austrtalia, Microsoft launched its public internet web domain with a home page. Website traffic climbed steadily and episodically in the years 1995 to 1999 as I headed toward a sea-change and retirement on the beautiful island state of Tasmania Australia where my wife had been born and where she and I had first met 25 years before in 1974 at the now University of Tasmania.

Daily site traffic of 35,000 in mid-1996, at the very start of the new Bahá'í culture of learning and growth, the new Bahá'í paradigm, grew to 5.1 million visitors by 1999, by the time I was in my house by the Tamar River just 5 kms from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean, by the time I was in my early retirement after decades of FT employment. I was only 55 back then.

Throughout 1997 and 1998 the site grew up and went from being the web equivalent of a start-up company to a world-class organization. I retired from FT work at just the right time in terms of the internet capacity to provide me with: (a) access to information by the truckload on virtually any topic; and (b) teaching opportunies, both direct and indirect, far in excess of any I had had in my previous decades as a Bahá'í. The world had become my literary oyster, so to speak.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania---Australia's oldest town.

This new technology had also developed sufficiently to a stage that gave me the opportunity, the capacity to post, write, indeed, “publish” is quite an appropriate term, on the internet at the same time. From 1999 to 2005, as I say, I released myself from FT, PT, casual and most volunteer work, and Google and Microsoft offered more and more technology for my writing activity for my work in a Cause that I had devoted my life to since my late teens and early twenties.

The Internet has become emblematic in many respects of globalisation. Its planetary system of fibre optic cables and instantaneous transfer of information are considered, by many accounts, one of the essential keys to understanding the transformation of the world into some degree of order and the ability to imagine the world as a single, global space. The Internet has widely been viewed as an essential catalyst of contemporary globalisation and it has been central to debates about what globalisation means and where it will lead.

There are now several hundred thousand readers, as I say above, engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my jig-saw puzzle, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my internet tapestry of writing that I have created across the world-wide-web. My literary product is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers(perhaps even millions since it has become impossible to keep even an accurate account of all those who come across what I write and see the name of the Cause) I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 4000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views. They are sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed the many forms of my literary output there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day over the last decade. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success.